Renewal of local government in Scandinavia: Effects for local politicians

During the last decade, numerous local government reforms influenced by New Public Management (NPM) ideology have taken place throughout Scandinavia. Based on case studies in three Scandinavian municipalities, the article discusses the effects of introducing strategic political management on the role of councillors. We observe a conflict between NPM‐inspired management ideas and a deeply institutionalised, traditional view of councillors as representatives of the citizens, advocating peoples’ interest, defining needs, setting priorities and controlling implementation. Across national and local contexts, councillors find that the reforms challenge their traditional role and have strengthened administrative influence. Historical institutionalism seems to be a fruitful concept to understand resistance towards taking on new role models.     

Local public management reforms in the Netherlands: fads, fashions and winds of change

Compared to other continental European countries, especially Germany and Switzerland, which have experimented with New Public Management (NPM) in local government, The Netherlands has been relatively quick in following trends stemming from Anglo-Saxon management thinking, but also relatively quick in redressing its course. The rise of the New Public Management in Dutch local government has been relatively swift and strong but also relatively superficial and non‐committal. The dominant picture that emerges is one of an administrative system that, while responsive to the latest trends, is also surprisingly stable. Management reforms, forcefully advocated in the 1980s, were decisively revised and redressed in the 1990s, with the city of Tilburg, celebrated for its 'Tilburg Model', a case in point. The Werdegang of NPM (that is, how things developed) in Dutch local government, detailed in this article, can be understood only partially as a result of changing economic and budgetary constraints. The article shows that endogenous features of the Dutch politico-administrative system – more specifically: the compact, dense and decentralized pattern of the intergovernmental network, the administrative tradition of pragmatism, dynamic conservatism and the comparatively technocratic character of local government – have also strongly influenced the reception, effect and correction of NPM in Dutch local government.     

Crossing Boundaries: Action Networks,Amalgamation and Inter-Community Trust in a Small Rural Shire

Local government reforms introduced throughout the mid-1990s radically altered the face, institutional form and structure of local government in the state of Victoria, Australia. In rural areas, where shire boundaries often reflected deeply ingrained notions of communal interest and identity, the forced merger of previously independent and fiercely parochial councils into larger unified political and administrative units was particularly contentious. Drawing on a survey of 649 residents from the rural Shire of Buloke, this paper examines attitudes towards local government amalgamation, levels of inter-community trust and reciprocity, and how these vary across different parts of the municipality. Social network analysis is then used to explore the relationship between these attitudes and trust levels and the structure and orientation of respondents’ inter-community networks. The paper finds that despite the passage of more than a decade, significant residual resentment surrounding the impact of the forced amalgamations remains evident across most communities in Buloke Shire. There is a widespread perception that the reforms have undermined rather than improved the operation of local government across the municipality, and that post-amalgamation political structures have largely failed to effectively reconcile the diverse and sometimes disparate interests of Buloke's constituent towns and communities. The network analysis also suggests that much work remains to be done to develop a meaningful sense of community based on the new administrative boundaries, with very little evidence of cross-community cooperation, coalition building or issue-based interaction detected.     

RESTRUCTURING WEBERIAN BUREAUCRACY: COMPARING MANAGERIAL REFORMS IN EUROPE AND THE UNITED STATES

In much of the international public administration literature, New Public Management (NPM) already appears to be bogged down in a quagmire of critical revisions and assessments. Although some criticisms are well founded, there can be no doubt that NPM represents a trend which has considerably affected public‐sector decision‐making worldwide. This article takes the examples of the Southern European bureaucracies, where NPM‐inspired reforms were introduced later than in the English‐speaking world, but have nevertheless played a decisive role in the political agenda of both socialist and conservative governments. The paper presents the results of a comparative study of administrative reforms in five European countries as well as the USA during the 1980s and 1990s. The comparison is based on three specific dimensions (central bureaucracies’ formal structure; civil service organization; administrative processes), enabling us to systematically measure and compare the progress of the various countries subsequent to the cycle of managerial reforms.     

Merging county administrations – cross-national evidence of fiscal and political effects

ABSTRACT

While many central governments amalgamate municipalities, mergers of larger county administrations are rare and hardly explored. In this article, we assess both fiscal and political effects of county mergers in two different institutional settings: counties act autonomously as upper-level local governments (Germany), or counties being decentralised branches of the state government (Austria). We apply difference-in-differences estimations to county merger reforms in each country. In both cases, some counties were amalgamated while others remain untouched. Austrian counties (Bezirke) and German counties (Landkreise) widely differ in terms of autonomy and institutions, but our results are strikingly similar. In both cases, we neither find evidence for cost savings nor for staff reductions. Instead, voter turnout consistently decreases in merged counties, and right-wing populists seem to gain additional support. We conclude that political costs clearly outweigh fiscal null benefits of county merger reforms – independent of the underlying institutional setting.     

Citizens versus Parties: Explaining Institutional Change in German Local Government, 1989–2008

Abstract

From 1989 to 2008, local governments in Germany have experienced ‘massive’ institutional change. Local constitutions have been altered in all German states giving citizens more say in local politics, while at the same time reducing local parties' influence. The paper first describes the changes according to two analytical models of local democracy. It then tries to explain the institutional change as a process of diffusion in a federal state. Three questions are answered in the explanatory part: Why did some forerunner states start with the reforms at the beginning of the 1990s and not earlier? Why did the reforms continue in other states although there was no general pressure from above? And why did some states continue with the reforms while others did not? In the first part of the paper the changes are described quantitatively while a qualitative approach is used in the explanatory part. The analyses show that the beginning of the reforms is related to ‘massive political failure’ while further reforms are a result of rational learning by different actors (large parties, small parties, non-governmental actors) depending on different means of reform. Based on these results we forecast a continuation of the reforms in the next years leading to a convergence of citizen-oriented local government all over Germany.     

The development and evolution of city-county management in Ireland: An illustration of central-local administrative relationships

Ireland was the first European nation to model its local governments after the American council-manager plan. Although the diffusion of the manager plan in the U.S. was slow, and at local initiative, the Irish experience was very different. The central government in Ireland imposed the manager plan on all urban districts, boroughs and counties within a short period of time. This “imposition” was designed with both political and administrative values in sight. Politically, the period immediately after independence from Great Britain was unstable and violent. A method was needed to bring order, stability and uniformity to the emerging nation. One approach was to exert central control over the activities of the one hundred elected councils in small towns, villages, boroughs and major cities. The institution of city-county manager was designed to facilitate the control by national political leaders over local authorities. Managers were appointed by the central Ministry of Local Government, were given significant administrative autonomy from local councils and were protected in their positions by national-level structures. The political values of stability, order, uniformity in the nation: building process created an environment for the emergence of new administrative values. Values of professionalism, efficiency, accountability, modernization replaced out-dated practices. An understanding of modern Ireland's experiences in local government administration may give additional insights into the active, essential role of administration in developing nations. Particularly, the role of administrators as stabilizers in conditions of political and social instability deserve our increased attention.     

THE ENTERPRISE FORMULA,NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND THE ITALIAN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM: REMEDY OR CONTAGION?

Health care services represent an extraordinary experimental ground for introducing wider political and institutional transformations of the state. The adoption of entrepreneurialism into European health care systems has strengthened technocratic decision making over traditional mechanisms of political control. In Italy, in the midst of a severe legitimacy crisis affecting the administrative and political systems at the beginning of the 1990s, New Public Management ideas seemed ‘the’ remedy against the pathological politicization of distributive politics. Much hope has been placed since in a new and ascending group of general managers, entrusted with the ambitious mission of running health care services more efficiently and with the unenviable expectation of resuscitating public trust in welfare institutions. By analysing the 1992 Amato government’s landmark health care reform in its substantive changes, this paper explores the last decade’s main reform trajectories of Italian health care reforms that irreversibly transformed its institutional arrangements and organizational structure, namely the enterprise formula and the regionalization of the health care sector. The paper suggests that the political turmoil of 1992–94 served as catalyst for radical policy change and argues that the single most important explanation for the enactment of New Public Management‐type reforms rests in a new executive reinterpretation of its legislative prerogatives and function.     

Agencification and Corporatization in Norway 1947–2011

We explore agencification and corporatization in the Norwegian central government. While these types of organizational change have often been linked to the NPM and post-NPM doctrines of recent decades, we will extend our analysis back to the post-World War II period. The empirical data are drawn from the Norwegian State Administration Database. The main focus will be on changes along the vertical dimension, i.e., conversions of ministerial units into state agencies and from state agencies to state-owned companies, or in the other direction. A main question is the organizational dynamics of agencification and corporatization. Why have the structure and organization of government changed, how and to what degree do the pattern of change reflect global trends in NPM and post-NPM reforms, and is the central government subject to the politics of structural choice. Moreover, what is the importance of national administrative doctrines, party constellations in government, and deliberate actions of administrative policy-makers?     

'Public Service', 'Public Management' and the 'Modernization' of French Public Administration

Since the mid-1980s, successive French governments have attempted to 'modernize' the structures and methods of public administration. Although this vocabulary of 'modernization' is distinctly French, many of the actual reforms appear, at first sight, to be based on imported 'new public management' doctrines. In this article, we analyse the recent French reforms and the ideas underpinning them and we attempt to locate these reforms in their comparative context, employing data from a wide range of official reports and secondary sources and from a series of semi-structured interviews with senior officials. We build on the analyses of Hood (1991 and 1995) and Wright (1994) that if many governments are dealing with similar problems by adopting similar approaches to reforms based on private sector man-agement methods, the actual nature of the reforms in any individual state depends on the national context, or 'initial endowment'. In France, the importance of administrative law, the successful experience of nationalized, monopoly, public-service providers in the post-war period, the political weight and established rights of civil servants, and the idea of the 'general interest', represented at the local level by the prefect, explain many of the distinctive features of the hybrid modernization reforms. In short, an analysis of the policy of modernization and its origin leads to conclusions which are highly consistent with new institutional explanations of policy making (Hall 1987)     

The Impact of Political Leadership on Organisational Performance: Evidence from English Urban Government

Many commentators view the political management reforms of English local government with some scepticism, raising concerns about the desirability of stronger leadership and the efficacy of institutional reform in encouraging stronger leadership. Using data from a five-year evaluation of the impact of the Local Government Act 2000, this paper reports evidence suggesting that institutional variation does influence the way that organisations operate and can have a positive impact on their performance, though the results are mixed with the internal decision-making elements showing most difference, whilst there is less evidence of effects in relation to partnership working and engagement with the public. In hung and balanced authorities an internal focus on managing coalitions and party competitors is judged to impede the role of leaders in partnership working. In the concluding section, the paper develops the concept of facilitative leadership, which will continue to influence reform of local government and the practice of political leadership in local government. Policy-makers, by giving leaders the right mix of resources and incentives, can improve the effectiveness of urban political leadership and encourage the trend towards facilitative leadership.     

Administrative reform in china: Issues and prospects

China's experience of organizational reform is representative of the country's attempts to implement more general administrative reform. Forty years of organizational reform have produced only short-term successes. In the 1988 reforms, however, leaders proposed for the first time to re-define the role of the state in society. In general, the reforms have been undermined by political, economic, and institutional problems. These include conflicting elite priorities, cycles of economic centralization and decentralization, the interdependence of government agencies and economic enterprises, and the lack of incentives to economize. Consequently, the organizational reform management institutions are very weak. Successful implementation of organizational reform in the future depends to a large extent on further economic development.     

Towards Strong Local Governance: Current Reform Scenario in Fiji

This article examines how the historical context of poor central-local relations and inefficient service delivery structure is used by the current military-led government in Fiji as a ploy for its local government reform agenda. Based on an analysis of secondary information on local government structure and a review of the reforms undertaken by the Review/Reform Committee, this article identifies the concentration of economic and political power at the central level as one of the major obstacles towards empowering local governance in Fiji. The article emphasizes the need for effective institutional reforms to devolve governance and resources from the centre to the grassroots.     

The view from below: Local government and Putin's reforms

Local government reforms in contemporary Russia are placed in the broader contexts of political reform under Putin and the historical relationship between local administration and the state. Reforms of local government thus help illuminate the architecture of contemporary state building in Russia and the degree to which contemporary Russia perpetuates political traditions. This study reviews the antecedent action in local government prior to the Putin era. It then examines the Kozak Commission and the new law on local government, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of these reforms. Finally, this study examines the challenges of implementing the reforms and what these challenges tell us about devolution and centralisation under Putin.     

Changes in the Scandinavian Model. From Bureaucratic Command to Interorganizational Negotiation

Scandinavian local government is increasingly changing its organizational pattern away from the principles of local centralized bureaucratic control that were held sacred after the reforms of the 1960s and 1970s - reforms that made local government the building block for the welfare 'state'. Organizational fragmentation is taking place, making room for both new managerial styles similar to those of the New Public Management, featuring contracting out and similar market-like arrangements, and for democratic initiatives which place service users in command of service institutions. Such developments call for new approaches to the study of local government, approaches that take interorganizational relations more directly into account. Suggestions about such an approach are made, based on studies of intergovernmental relations. Distinctions are made between intergovernmental politics which is concerned with symbolic values linked to the status of an organization, and intergovernmental management where processes of making do are seen as most important. In spite of the managerial fashion for strategic goal-setting, it is expected that the new political actors are more interested in day-to-day results and thus challenge politicians, moving them away from the abstract goals in favour of advancing and monitoring actual accomplishments. This increases the need to understand network relations and, in turn, may yield better understanding on the part of citizens of how local politics and management works.     

Local public management reforms in Germany

This article, part of a sequence of comparative articles on local government reforms in The Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany, describes and analyses the recent public management reforms at the local level of Germany. After an overview about the constitutional framework of local self government and the reform waves of the last decades, the paper concentrates on the 'new steering model' as the German variant of NPM. The article shows the short history of this reform movement, describes the main elements of the reform concept and explains some of the causes, forces and actors of implementation. It goes on to discuss the present status of implementation, explains several shortcomings of the concept, and presents the – very limited – empirical evidence of achieved results. Finally, the paper draws some conclusions from a comparative view on the similarities and differences of local management reforms in Germany and the two other countries.     

New Public Management and Democratic Participation: Complementary or Competing Reforms? A South African Study

Abstract

Administrative and participatory reforms are common in developing countries, often introduced together and expected to complement each other. Some observers question whether the reforms do complement each other, however, specifically suggesting that the two types reflect different relational and governance patterns. Based on such thought, a “differential relationship influence hypothesis” is presented and tested, investigating whether new public management (NPM) reforms complement or compete with democratic‐participatory reforms. Econometric analysis of survey data shows that South African municipalities adopt NPM reforms more readily when influenced by top–down intergovernmental relationships but adopt participatory reforms more readily when faced with bottom–up civic influences. This evidence supports the hypothesis and indicates that administrative and participatory reforms may not complement each other. The study also indicates a common administrative culture effect on both types of reform adoption—differential relational influences can be tempered by experimental and change‐minded administrators in local governments.     

The role of local government in the review of public administration in Northern Ireland: The challenges of enhancement,devolution and modernisation

A very limited system of local government has been one of the main characteristics of public administration in Northern Ireland for the past 35 years. Yet in the recently completed Review of Public Administration changes in local government occupied a very dominant position. This article gives an account of the reasons for this, analyses the processes which led to what may be viewed as an enhancement of local government but argues that the principles adopted by the UK Government to guide the reforms, of subsidiarity, strong local government, coterminosity and good relations have not been met. The lack of an analysis in the Review of the implications of devolution for local government reform and the distribution of functions is highlighted including the relevance of the distinction between administrative and political devolution. How the proposed reforms relate to the UK-wide local government modernisation agenda is also discussed.     

NEW PUBLIC MANAGEMENT FOR THE ‘CLASSICAL CONTINENTAL EUROPEAN ADMINISTRATION’: MODERNIZATION AT THE LOCAL LEVEL IN GERMANY,FRANCE AND ITALY

The article is aimed at analysing New Public Management (NPM) reforms at the local level in Germany, France and Italy. The case selection is justified by the fact that these three ‘classical’ Continental European countries have largely been missing from comparative administrative research thus far. The article focuses on local governments, since in all three countries these are considered the NPM forerunners and are acknowledged to be more advanced in reform implementation than are upper levels of government. Against this background, the purpose of this contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we wish to show to what extent and with what effects the NPM agenda has been taken up at the local level in Continental Europe. On the other hand, taking a comparative perspective over time, we wish to ask whether or not there has been increasing convergence or divergence between the three countries as a result of these reforms.     

The Dynamics of Decentralization and Recentralization

Decentralization of authority from central government to sub-national governments is an important part of modern public sector reforms and has been the primary contribution to public sector reform in Denmark and the other Nordic countries. On the assumption that political and administrative actors are authority maximizers, the paper analyses how national and sub-national actors react to these decentralization goals, and the extent to which they are implemented. The analysis points to the importance of both institutional and power variables. It concludes that dynamic change can take place in a public sector which is characterized by strong corporatist and multi-level institutions, such as in Denmark.